RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Monday, June 3

SONG OF THE DAY: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

The first time I did a cross country Greyhound
trip, it went from Farmville, VA, to Oklahoma City, then up to Colorado, and
then back to Keysville, VA. The night before I left, I watched Pat Garrett
& Billy the Kid, and filled a flask with Jim Beam that I carried with me on
my trip. The bus station in Farmville at that point was at a country store in
West End of town, and my dad gave me a ride there on his lunch break. An outlaw
woman my folks both knew worked there at the time actually, and my dad was kinda
freaked out about me disappearing, but whatever fuck it, to him it would’ve
been gay to express emotions like that, so he let me disappear. The Greyhound
showed up, and two guys got off the bus to grab snacks, one of them proceeded
to pass out in the store because of some pills he’d just taken, and we were on
our way.

A lot of hilarious and fucked up memories from
that trip – spending four days drinking alone in a shitty OKC motel room in a
sketchy motel, wandering Boulder and realizing how out of place I am with a lot
of society, making my way home to what was home then but now I feel horribly
disconnected from. I walked to the pay phone at the gas station about a half
mile from where the Greyhound dropped you off back then in Keysville (at the
old video store/arcade place), called my mom to come pick me up, singing “Walkin’
Back to Georgia” by Jim Croce the whole time. Sat on my backpack and my mom
picked me up, and now we are estranged, and thus I am estranged from my home,
with no desire to fix it. I’ve had a couple of broken relationships I’ve
recently considered repairing, but it felt like more work to keep them broken
than reconnect them, but it’s only caused me to return what caused the break in
the first place, and honestly that shit ain’t on me.

I am feeling my mortality now more than ever before in my life. Previously, I
assumed I’d be dead by now to be honest, following the path laid before me by
my dad and his dad – dead in mid-40s, a tombstone that eventually gets visited
less and less because everybody has moved on, both emotionally and geographically.
I labor in ways that don’t satisfy me, and the things that do satisfy are seen
as lacking value to our culture. There’s always that saying “do what you love
and you’ll never work a day in your life!” and it pisses me off to no end
because that’s not realistic, at fucking all. I am filled with resentment and
anger, and feel as though I have spent my energies on others, and not on
myself. This would be fine if I got a return on that energy expended, but I ain’t
feeling it. So I feel like disappearing again, and doing so by the warming
light of an arsenal of burned bridges. Thus, music like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s
Door” – a personal soundtrack for saying
fuck it – seems to sound louder than normal to me lately. The seeds of saying
fuck it are sown over generations, and they always still sit inside somebody
like me. You can break a lot of cycles and habits and cause them to be more
dormant, not bear fruit automatically with perennial persistence. But still,
the conditions get right, your life is composted with just the right combo of
frustration, dissatisfaction, and going nowhereness, and a seedling of fuck it
sprouts again. And you might want to weed it out right away, but they start
sprouting a lot, and you’ve weeded so many out, and you start to wonder, “why
the fuck am I weeding this out and nobody else is?” And you contemplate letting
it grow, and bear fruit again, even though you know that fruit is mildly
poisonous (and fatal in abundance… like my father and grandfather taught me).
But it feels like a futile effort to keep weeding the fuck its out. And that’s
where I am right now.

starting points

What It Do

Low art formed in low places by a real dude. Bread words on the bedazzling bedeviled internet machines. For flesh and blood contact, or exchanges of treasure or tribute): RAVEN MACK PO BOX 585 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22902. For 1s and 0s robot contact (or exchanges of virus and vinegraic piss): ravenmack at gmail dot com. Paypal support can be thrown at that email address too if you got it like that.

Might I suggest the best way to enjoy my madness is to scroll to the bottom and get lost in the tag labyrinth.